4.  This suggestion will be welcomed by all dogmatists—­until they discover that it does not help them to agree together, because they are all as certain as can be.  But a critically-minded man will urge against it that ’certainty’ is a subjective and psychological criterion, and that no one has been able to devise a method for distinguishing the alleged logical from the undeniable psychological certainty.  He will hesitate to say, therefore, that because a belief seems certain it is true, and to trust the formal claim to infallibility which is made in every judgment.  And when ‘intuitions’ are appealed to, he will ask how ‘true’ intuitions are to be discriminated from ‘false,’ sound from insane, and inquire to what he is committing himself in admitting the truth of intuitions.  He will demand, therefore, the publication of a list of the intuitions which are absolutely true.  But he will not get it, and if he did, it may be predicted that he would not find a single one which has not been disputed by some eminent philosopher.

5.  Intuitions, therefore, are an embarrassment, rather than a help to Intellectualism.  It has to maintain both that intuitions are the foundations of all truth and certitude, and also that not all are true.  But our natural curiosity as to how these sorts are to be known apart is left unsatisfied.  We must not ask which are true, and which not.  No one can say in advance about what matters intuitive certainty is possible; what is, or is not, an intuition is revealed only to reflection after the event.  Only if an intuition has played us false, we may be sure it was not infallible; it must either have been one of the fallible sort, or else no intuition at all.

6.  At this point universal scepticism begins to raise its hydra head, and to grin at the dogmatist’s discomfiture.  For in point of fact the history of thought reveals, not a steady accumulation of indubitable truth, but a continuous strife of opinions, in which the most widely accepted beliefs daily succumb to fresh criticism and fall into disrepute as the ‘errors of the past.’  Nothing, it seems, can guarantee a ‘truth,’ however firmly it may be believed for a time, from the corrosive force of new speculation and changed opinion; to survey the field of philosophic dispute, strewn with the remains of ‘infallible’ systems and ‘absolute’ certainties, is to be led irresistibly to a sceptical doubt as to the competence of human thought.  If ’absolute truth’ is our ideal and acquaintance with ‘absolute reality’ our aim, then, in view of the persistent illusions on both these points to which the human mind is liable, it seems necessary to recognize the hopelessness of our search.  Thus the last dilemma of dogmatism is reached.  In view of the diversity of human beliefs and the discredit which has historically fallen on the most axiomatic articles of faith, we must either admit scepticism to be the issue of the debate, or else, condemning our absolute view of truth, find some means of utilizing the relative truths which are all that humanity seems able to grasp.  But to come to terms with relativism is to renounce the dogmatic attitude entirely, and to approach the problems of philosophy in a totally different spirit.